Okay, I'm going to raise another objection about the system. Firstly, some good things:
- Lots of narrow skills (since that's what it's trying to do).
- Learning one skill impacts learning on related skills (the whole edged-weapons thing that you discussed with Roger on Saturday).
- Different categories of skills allowing the development both of 'power' skills and 'flavour' skills.
But there remains a weakness in the system. In reality, people have a whole bunch of skills at low levels. This is hardly surprising, and in systems with a small number of skills can be ignored. In a system with lots of skills, though, there should be a mechanism to encourage this. And Rolemaster really doesn't - instead it seems to encourage PCs to develop a small number of skills in each category to a high level.
Then again, I don't really care too much. The Rolemaster system seems reasonably solid at its core, and I can probably live without knowing if my character has developed 1 or 0 ranks in the tie (reef knot) skill :-)
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm not sure how a system can, mechanically, make a player raise a large number of skills. Apart from giving a big bonus for having atleast some knowledge in a skill. In Rolemaster you gain +30 for taking one rank in a skill. (As you have -25 if unskilled and +5 for rank 1.) Which is pretty good I think.
Now if the player feels there is no need to have more than two skills in each category, there's not much that can be done about that, I think. But that player better not start moaning when his character gets sick by eating poison mushrooms for dinner because he didn't have enough flora lore to identify them and no cooking skill to prepare them.
Oh, yeah, rope mastery (Which includes tying knots and suchlike) is a very useful skill, you wouldn't want that boat of yours to sail away without you do you? Or what about that nasty thief you just captured, who is going to tie him up?